The acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Trevor Paglen believes that digital art has too often been held back by uneven curation and by a failure to identify the artists and works capable of sustaining serious critical attention. As co-curator, alongside Eli Scheinman, of Zero 10, ‘The Condition’ – the third edition of Art Basel’s global initiative dedicated to art of the digital era – Paglen is taking a more considered curatorial approach. For the artist, who also co-curated with Scheinman three talks in the Conversations program, the opposition between digital art and the traditional art world no longer makes sense given how deeply intertwined the two have become. He reflects on how digital art addresses the most urgent questions of our time. 

What made you want to take on the role of co-curator for Zero 10?
Currently we’re seeing a kind of ‘civil war’ between the blockchain community and the traditional art world, which I find strange. In reality, almost every artist today works digitally in some way – whether that’s a photographer working with digital images, or a sculptor modelling in Blender before fabrication. So, the divide is not as clear as people pretend.

What felt important to you when selecting the works in Zero 10?
We’re trying to bring a level of rigor to the curation. There has been a lot of dross in digital art, frankly, so the idea was to choose works we felt were museum-quality and to create a shared framework where more traditional positions and digital or post-blockchain practices can sit alongside each other.

How do you begin to bridge those different worlds?
If nobody tries to bridge these worlds, they just become more antagonistic, which feels counterproductive. On one side, there are canonical artists who aren’t really understood as digital artists – like Andreas Gursky, who has been thinking for a long time about what images are in a moment when they’re infinitely manipulatable. On the other, there are really strong artists in the post-blockchain space who’ve often been poorly served by weak curation, like Tyler DeWitt, who works as 0xDEAFBEEF. If you stripped away the name and placed their work in an institutional context, it would read immediately as a serious piece of contemporary art.

Does a context like Art Basel change how artists like 0xDEAFBEEF – known for on-chain audiovisual work – can be received?
It gives access to a very different audience and context, and we’re looking for artists and works that can actually hold up in that environment. Not everything translates. The aim is to create what I jokingly call a ‘safe space’, where you can see artists you already know in a different light, and also encounter artists you might not know, but in a setting where their work can be read with rigor.

One of the talks you’ve programmed is titled ‘Barbarians at the Gates! Let Them in!?’ Do you see the growing acceptance of digital art as a challenge to the established order?
I was being a bit spicy with that title! But I don’t know if it’s a changing of the order so much as a moment of transition. We currently have a collision of worlds – internet-native artists and collectors engaging with people from traditional, institutional backgrounds. I think it’s important to identify serious work from artists who haven’t been taken seriously by institutions – often because they emerged in contexts without strong critical or institutional frameworks.

What role do institutions have in shaping how digital art is understood?
Right now we’re in a period of enthusiastic, high-volume output, but it’s occurring within a framework that requires a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of institutions – who they serve, what they exclude, and how they remain relevant. If you project five or 10 years into the future, institutions could go in many different directions, especially as artists and collectors emerge from internet-native contexts. HeK, the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, marks the first time an institution has taken part in Zero 10, and they’ve been thinking about digital art in this expanded sense for a long time. Their collection includes works that, to me, are absolutely canonical – artists like JODI, UBERMORGEN, and etoy – people I was looking at when I was coming up. At the time, that work was marginalized by mainstream institutions, but that’s starting to change.

In your curatorial statement, you say the works in Zero 10 address some of the most important questions in contemporary art. What makes them so urgent now?
Many of the artists featured in the exhibition – from Hito Steyerl to Avery Singer – have challenged me, in different ways, to see the world differently. What is ownership when a file can be copied infinitely? What does it mean to make art in a world flooded with AI-generated images? These aren’t niche ‘digital art’ concerns; they go to the heart of what it means to be an artist now. What are we actually doing? That feels very pressing, even if artists have probably been asking versions of those questions for thousands of years.

Where do you see digital art heading in the next few years?
That’s hard to say. I think there’ll be increasing interplay between what artists, markets, and institutions are doing. AI, for instance, has completely transformed the workflow in my studio. We can now run experiments in two weeks that would previously have taken years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Does that speed also change what we expect from art?
For me, the most successful art isn’t necessarily something that simply shows me an image. It’s something that urges me to generate an image for myself. In that sense, the art I’m most interested in works almost like a prompt, so that I’m creating the image. But if you look at digital art more broadly, it’s often met with a certain eye-rolling, even from quite sophisticated people. It’s time we moved on. What we have now are people who are genuinely engaged, who want to participate in culture in a meaningful way.